Dissociative Identity Disorder Poem
This is a poem I wrote about recovering from a dissociative identity disorder. It was a rather confusing time for many years and so I’m hoping when I share this poem you can relate if you are also struggling with DID.
Dissociative Identity Disorder
There’s me,
me,
and me
I was dissociated, you see?
In parts,
I split to escape,
When it was too hard,
In feeling all of my painful states
I became aloof,
Always spaced out,
And I flew away,
I was never present,
In my body, I never stayed
Instead I got lost,
Got lost in one part of me,
Then the other,
Who am I today?
I don’t even bother
The artist was born,
The one who paints from her heart,
The one who feels and cries,
The one who surrenders to the art
How about the others?
They’re protective personas you see,
To try hard, and survive trying,
No matter who I was,
I wasn’t free
I’d lose myself,
To guys and the social world,
I’d get high right away,
But never with myself I’d stay
No wonder I got stressed,
I lived and performed for others,
Losing myself to each personality,
I would fall away from me like gravity
Oh social media world,
Just like a guy,
I throw myself at you
Cuz I thought you could love me,
Accept all that I’d have to say,
So I’d try harder to be perfect,
And try to make it go my way
And I make it all about you,
Instead of me and how I feel,
I let you own me,
This is why I was not truly real
Expression from my heart,
From the depths of my soul,
The truth will set me free
In God I dwell
and there I’ll be
In the analysis of this poem, the dissociation forms multiple personalities, hence “me, me and me.” The reason why we split is that the pain is too great to cope with, so our form of splitting is our form of escape and diluting the pain we experience.
I feel the more sensitive and artistic someone is, the greater the chances of this splitting or dissociation happening. The key to healing is to return back to the body and pay attention to the inner body.
However, the persona that is the creative or artist, can be the most therapeutic or healing personality. The other personas sometimes were created to survive our experience and our social world. As long as each persona is not integrated and split from the self, we will never feel free or whole, so that is why emotional integration and the journey of wholeness become paramount.
When you are dissociated, it’s easy to lose yourself because you’re already split, to begin with so it only takes parts of you to fade away to feel like you lost yourself. As well, when we are dissociated we aren’t grounded so it’s easy for us to get high and fly away from ourselves.
As well, because we don’t have our own wholeness or grounding, we deeply seek unconditional love and fall into addictions harder and faster and become heavily attached or dependent on a source outside of us because we already feel so dissociated.
This kind of dependency or co-dependency then perpetuates the pattern of running away or abandoning ourselves, becoming high or attached, and losing more of who we are. For creatives struggling with DID, it is a significant part of the process to get in touch with and heal with the artistic part of ourselves, find our authentic voices, and express what we need to from our hearts truthfully.